Rivet Logic Blogs

Tag: Web Content Management

Forrester has coined the term Age of the Customer to describe today’s customer-centric era. To succeed, businesses must not only undergo a digital transformation, but to also do so with their customers’ needs in mind.

The modern consumer’s demands are ever increasing, they want the convenience of researching and comparing products online, and they want that information to be delivered on their terms. They also want options, with the ability to choose when, where, and how they interact with your brand.

Meanwhile, the digital landscape is ever changing, with the number of touchpoints on the rise, and each interaction with your brand is a piece of the overall experience. The key to a successful multi-channel approach is to put users at the center of your digital strategy and offer them a consistent experience throughout the entire journey that may span across multiple channels in a single transaction.

However, that consistent multi-channel experience also needs to be contextual, to serve up relevant content that enable users to more effectively perform tasks based on different scenarios they may be in. For example, a banking desktop site might show the user’s account summary after they log in, whereas its mobile app might want to show nearby branch locations.

Your technology needs to simplify this otherwise complex process, through a flexible solution that’s able to serve up that seamless experience for your users – they need to be able to switch from a desktop site to mobile app, and be able to pick up exactly where they left off.

To accomplish this, businesses need a flexible Multi-channel Content Management solution that can effectively engage a variety of audience groups across all applications, devices, and channels.

Rivet Logic’s Multi-channel Content Management solution is a seamless integration of Crafter CMS and Alfresco, enabling businesses to create and manage all content types through a user-friendly authoring tool, then publish to any or all channels and formats in a single step!

The solution leverages Alfresco for its powerful content management capabilities and Crafter CMS for its modern platform for building and managing rich online experiences across all digital channels. The result is a solution that allows you to create engaging, two-way conversations with your users to enable that personalized interaction with your brand!

Learn more about how you can benefit from a Multi-channel Content Management solution in our datasheet.

The internet plays a huge influential role in our daily purchasing decisions, most of the time without us even noticing as it’s become so second nature. Whether it’s checking out a restaurant menu before trying it out, checking to see if a product is available at a specific store, or seeing if a business’s solutions can benefit you, a company’s online presence can drastically affect the impression it leaves on a visitor, making it crucial to have a site that delivers an engaging and lasting experience.

In our latest case study published earlier this year, we take a detailed look at how a leading cloud services and communications company is leveraging a Crafter CMS solution to deliver a dynamic, engaging Web experience while increasing site traffic and sales leads.

Rebranding Effort For a Cloud Services and Communications Company Leads to a New Dynamic Website for a Higher Quality Customer Web Experience

As a leading, award-winning cloud and communications services provider, this organization serves as the technology ally for small and mid-sized businesses by delivering services through their private, high-bandwidth enterprise network and data centers. By shifting the technology burden to the provider, they strive to help their customers save valuable time, money and resources.

Customer service excellence has been a big part of this company’s culture since its inception, making it imperative to maintain a cutting edge Web presence. This customer had recently undergone a corporate rebranding initiative, and as part of the effort, had sought to provide a far more dynamic and engaging Web experience for its users. With these objectives in mind, it was quickly realized that there was a need for a new enterprise-class Web Content Management System (CMS) with the robust functionality to effectively address existing needs, along with the flexibility to tackle any ongoing future requirements.

Unlimited Agility Through Open Source Innovation

Led by the Marketing Department, and working in conjunction with the product development groups along with senior executives, this customer wanted to ensure the new website produced the end result they desired. They knew that with any new Web CMS solution, flexibility was a top priority – flexibility of design, using in-house resources, customization, and adapting to ongoing needs.

As an organization that works with a variety of third party vendors for their projects, this customer saw the benefits of open source when it came to flexibility in choosing future development partners when the need arose to grow the Web application with additional components. So they also sought a content management platform that was open, agile and sported a rich feature set. After evaluating a number of potential products, an integrated solution based on Crafter and Alfresco emerged as a clear choice.

Paving the Way to Serve as a Full Fledged Technology Ally for Its Customers

With the new website, this customer has seen an increase in content production and publishing productivity, and are better able to quickly respond and adapt to the data received from analytics. The dynamic content pages provide a proficient way of cataloguing and repurposing content throughout the site. Since re-launching the site using Crafter CMS, overall website traffic has increased by 9 percent while the number of leads generated have more than doubled that amount.

2014 is here in full swing, and promises to be an exciting year as the web continues to evolve and new products and trends continue to disrupt the industry.

In 2013, we saw the continued rise of mobile and the age of the customer, where enterprises worldwide re-evaluated strategies to optimally engage with their customers in this digital era. As mobile devices continue to proliferate and have become the new norm, consumers have increasingly higher expectations of the right content delivered to them when and how they want it, resulting in customer experience management skyrocketing to the top of every organization’s priority list.

However, experience management doesn’t just apply to customers, but instead extends to include all organizational stakeholders – customers, employees, partners, etc. We also saw organizations take a closer look internally and focus their efforts on employee community building. Realizing that workplace environments are changing, with a greater need for enterprise collaboration now than ever before, companies are implementing social intranet solutions that offer dynamic and social environments to facilitate community and collaboration.

In addition, many organizations are also building web-based social communities for their external stakeholders for further engagement to improve customer relations and build brand loyalty.

Tackling these daunting digital experience management tasks require careful planning and execution. Organizations need to first determine their business strategies and goals and take the time to really understand their audience to formulate the right messaging. A well thought out strategy sets the right foundation to build your systems – customer experience management, social intranet, customer portal, etc. – upon. The technology should be an enabler of your goals and facilitate your business users to effectively carry out your business objectives.

At Rivet Logic, we believe that software should be agile systems that can easily be customized to fit each organization’s unique needs. There’s no one-size-fits-all tool, and your underlying system must be flexible and developer friendly to allow various customizations and integrations with other existing enterprise applications. In addition, your system must be user friendly for business users. As we’ve seen over the past few years, there’s been a shift from IT to Marketing as Marketing’s responsibilities have expanded to include multi-channel web content management, customer experience management, and more. The tools we employ must be easy to use for non-technical business users.

In 2014 we’ll continue to see these trends evolve. Organizations will continue to put a large emphasis on customer experience management and creating a seamless omni-channel experience as mobile continues to grow. Businesses will also focus more on big data. The explosive growth of social media and mobile devices has generated an enormous amount of user behavioral data that can be harnessed to provide organizations with valuable insight on how to better address the needs of their customers and employees.

Digital Clarity Group recently launched their Guide to Service Providers for Web Content and Customer Experience Management – 2013 North American edition.

The research report provides valuable insight regarding the growing demand and necessity for customer experience management (CEM), and the key role service providers play in helping organizations deliver successful digital customer experiences.

“The forces of digital disruption have empowered consumers and created a growing demand for rich, engaging, and consistent experiences across multiple channels and touchpoints. Customer experience management (CEM) designates an evolving set of practices, technologies, partnerships, and business values that, taken together, enable organizations to orchestrate, offer, and optimize consistently superior customer experiences. Mastering CEM is an imperative because the quality of the experiences you offer and support will increasingly determine the fate of your company.”

“It is crucial to realize that no software vendor offers a packaged solution or a complete platform for customer experience management. Companies draw upon a broad, growing, and rapidly shifting ecosystem of software solutions to support CEM. Because most interactions depend, or at least draw, upon content in a digital format, web content management (WCM) tools and practices will continue to play a central role in the CEM ecosystem for the foreseeable future.”

While technology is an enabler in delivering CEM, the real success lies in how the initiative is implemented, and choosing the right service provider — whether it be a systems integrator, digital agency, or consultant — plays a critical role.

“The customer experience imperative is clear. Organizations must create connected digital content experiences across all of the channels they manage,” says Cathy McKnight, Partner and Principal Analyst, DCG. “Successful deployment of these tools requires true expertise and, most of all, experience. Selecting the right service provider to help deploy these solutions can make or break an organization’s plan.”

The full report takes a look at 42 North American service providers that organizations might want to consider in a Web content management system implementation. Rivet Logic is proud to be a featured systems integrator participating in this report.

Click here to learn more about CEM and to download a special edition of the report.